They approached a bench and sat down. Hippolyte sank down with a weary
sigh, as if overcome by an enervating weakness. The heavy black coach
of a prelate passed by on the road below, the wheels rattling on the
uneven cobblestones. The faint sound of a bugle came from the Flaminian
Road, and then once more silence regained possession of the surrounding
groves. A few drops of rain fell.
"Our second anniversary will be dismal," he went on, without pity for
his moody companion. "But we must celebrate it all the same. I have a
fondness for bitter fruits."
Hippolyte revealed her sorrow by a painful smile, and with unexpected
gentleness said: "Why all these unkind words?"
She looked long and searchingly into George's eyes. A second time an
inexpressible desire to read each other's hearts seized them. She knew
well the horrible malady from which her lover suffered; she knew well
the obscure cause of all his acrimony. To induce him to talk so he
might unburden his heart, she added:
"What ails you?"
The tenderness of her tone, for which he was unprepared, threw him into
some confusion. At this accent he knew that she understood him and
pitied him; and he felt a great pity for himself swell in his bosom. A
profound emotion stirred his whole being.
"What ails you?" repeated Hippolyte, touching his hand as though to
sensually augment the power of her tenderness.
"What ails me?" he echoed. "I love!"
The aggressiveness had died away. In thus expressing his incurable
weakness, he commiserated with himself on his own malady. The vague
rancor which had ravaged his soul appeared to be dissipated. He
recognized the injustice of all resentment against this woman because he
recognized a superior order of fatal necessities. No, no human creature
caused his misery. It arose from the very essence of life. He had to
complain, not of the woman he loved, but of Love itself. Love, towards
which his whole being reached out with invincible impetuosity, was, he
thought, the greatest of human sorrows. And, until death possibly, he
was condemned to this supreme misfortune.
As he remained silent and thoughtful, Hippolyte asked:
"Then do you think, George, that I don't love you?"
"I believe that you love me now," he answered. "But can you prove to me
that to-morrow, or in a month, or in a year, you will still be happy to
be mine? Can you prove to me that to-day, even at this very moment, you
are wholly mine? How much of you do I possess?"
"Everything," murmured Hippolyte.
"No," he went on, "nothing, or almost nothing. And I do not possess
what I should like to possess. You are a perfect stranger to me. Like
every other human being, you conceal within yourself a world which is
impenetrable to me and to which no depth of passion can give me access.
Of your sensations, your sentiments, your thoughts, I know but a small
part. Speech is at best an imperfect sign. The soul is incommunicable.
You cannot show me your soul. Even in our most ecstatic moments we are
two, always two--separate, strangers, lonely at heart. I kiss your
brow, and beneath that brow there exists possibly a thought that is not
of me. I speak to you and what I say perhaps awakens in you memories of
other days, and not of my love. A man passes, looks at you, and in your
heart this slight fact gives rise to an emotion which I am unable to
detect. And I never know what reflections of your past life may flash
upon you even when you show most affection for me. Ah, I am so afraid
of that past life of yours! I am by your side; I feel a delicious
happiness invade my being, a happiness which at certain moments results
from your presence alone. I caress you, I speak to you, I listen to you,
I abandon myself entirely. All at once, a thought chills me. If,
without being aware of it, I had evoked in your memory the phantom of a
former sensation, melancholy relic of by-gone days? Never can I
describe my anguish. This ardor, which induces in me the illusory
feeling of I know not what communion between you and me, dies out all at
once. You escape me, you steal away, you become inaccessible. And I
remain alone in frightful solitude. Ten, twenty months of intimacy, are
all as nothing. You seem to me as much a stranger as before your love
for me began. And I--I cease to caress you, I no longer speak, I retire
within myself, I avoid all external manifestation, I dread that the
slightest shock should raise from the bottom of your soul the obscure
dregs deposited there by irrevocable life. And then there fall on us
those long silences full of anguish, in which the energies of the heart
are uselessly and miserably consumed. I ask you: 'Of what are you
thinking?' And you reply: 'Of what are you thinking?' I am ignorant of
your thoughts and you are ignorant of mine. Every moment the distance
between us widens, until finally it becomes abysmal."
"But," objected Hippolyte, "I experience no such feelings. I give you
more of myself than ever. I think my love is stronger."
This affirmation of superiority wounded anew the invalid.
"You think too much," she continued. "You pay too much attention to
your thoughts. Possibly I have less attraction for you than your
thoughts, because your thoughts are always different, always new, while
now I have nothing that is new to offer you. In the beginning of our
love you were less reflective and more spontaneous. You had not yet
developed a taste for the bitter things in life; you were more lavish
with your kisses than with your words. If, as you say, speech is an
imperfect sign, it is not well to abuse it. And you do abuse it and in
an almost always cruel manner."
Then, after an interval of silence, prompted to speak by something he
said, she yielded to the temptation to express herself:
"Only cadavers are dissected."
But scarcely had she spoken than she regretted it. Her remark struck
her as being vulgar, unfeminine, and acrimonious. She was sorry she had
not preserved that gentle and indulgent tone which had moved her lover
so strongly a few moments before. Once more she had failed in her
resolution to be to him the most patient and tender of nurses.
"You see," she said repentantly, "it is you who spoil me."
He gave a faint smile. Both understood that in this quarrel their love
only had been wounded.
The prelate's carriage repassed, the two black, long-tailed horses going
at a trot. In the atmosphere which the haze of twilight rendered more
and more livid, the trees assumed the appearance of spectres.
Leaden-looking clouds darkened the height of the Palatine and the
Vatican. A ray of light, yellow as sulphur, straight as a sword,
lightly touched Mount Mario behind the pointed tops of the
cypress-trees.
"Does she still love me?" George thought to himself. "Why is she so
easily irritated? It may be that she feels that I speak the truth, or,
at least, what will soon be the truth. Irritation is a symptom. But am
I not conscious of a constant dull irritation in myself also? I know
well the cause of my irritation. I am jealous. Of what? Of
everything. Of the objects reflected in her eyes."
He looked at her. "She is very beautiful to-day. She is pale. It
would please me to see her always depressed, always ill. When her color
returns it seems to me as if it were no longer she. When she laughs I
cannot repress a vague hostility, almost anger, at her laugh. Not
always, though."
His thoughts died away in the shade of the twilight. He noticed
suddenly how much the appearance of the evening reminded him of his
beloved. From beneath the pallor of her dark face a light,
violet-colored effusion shone through; and the narrow ribbon, of an
exquisite shade of yellow, which she wore about her throat disclosed the
brown marks of two beauty spots.
"She is very beautiful," he mused. "The expression of her face is
nearly always profound, expressive, passionate. Therein rests the secret
of her charm. Her beauty never tires me; it constantly suggests new
dreams. What are the elements of this beauty? I cannot say.
Materially, she is not beautiful. Sometimes, when I look at her, I am
painfully surprised by a disillusion. That is because I then see only
her physical characteristics; her face is not transfigured, illumined by
the power of spiritual expression. She possesses, however, three divine
elements of beauty: the brow, the eyes, and the mouth. Yes, divine."
Her laugh came to his mind.
"What did she tell me yesterday? I have forgotten what it was, some
humorous incident that had happened at Milan during her visit to her
sister's. '_How we laughed!_' So then, even when away from me, she can
_laugh_, be happy! Yet all her letters, which I have treasured, are full
of sorrow, of tears, of hopeless regrets."
He felt as if he had received a wound, and then a great restlessness
came upon him, as if he were cognisant of a serious and irreparable fact
not entirely clear to him. The ordinary phenomena of sentimental
exaggeration manifested themselves in him by means of associated images.
This simple laugh was transformed in his imagination into an incessant
hilarity, ever-present, daily, hourly, during the entire period of her
absence. Hippolyte had led a gay, commonplace existence, with people
unknown to him, among the companions of her brother-in-law, in a circle
of stupid admirers. Her sad letters were only lies. He remembered a
passage in one letter: "_Life here is insupportable; friends weary us
constantly and do not leave us a single peaceful hour. You know how
cordial the Milanese are._" In his imagination arose a vision of
Hippolyte surrounded by a crowd of common clerks, advocates, and
tradesmen. She smiled on them all, giving her hand to all, listening to
witless conversations, making stupid answers, sinking herself to the
same ordinary level.
And then there fell upon his heart all the weight of the misery he had
endured for the past two years at the thought of the existence his
mistress led and the unknown world in which she passed the time not
spent with him.
"What does she do? Whom does she see? To whom does she speak? What is
her behavior towards people who visit her, in whose life she is a
factor?" Ever-recurring, unanswerable questions!
He thought, with anguish:
"Each one of these persons takes something from her, and consequently
takes something from me. I shall never know what influence these people
have over her, the emotions and thoughts they arouse in her.
Hippolyte's beauty is full of seductive power, the kind of beauty which
torments men and arouses in them the passion of desire. Among that
odious crowd, she must have been frequently desired. A man's desire is
discernible in his look and the look is free, and the woman is without
defence against the look of the man who desires her. What can be the
impression of a woman who perceives that she is desired? She certainly
cannot remain impassive. It must produce in her a feeling of
disquietude, certainly some kind of emotion, if only one of repugnance
and disgust. And thus the first man who comes along has the power to
disturb the woman who loves me! In what, then, consists my possession
of her?"
He suffered keenly because the physical pictures bore out his mental
reasoning.
"I love Hippolyte; I love her with a passion which I should judge to be
everlasting, did I not know that all human passion must cease at some
time. I love her, and I cannot imagine keener voluptuous delights than
those she gives me. More than once, however, at the sight of some
passing woman, I have been seized with a sudden desire; more than once
has the flash of a pair of feminine eyes thrown me into a melancholy
train of thought; more than once I have dreamed of meeting some woman--a
woman perceived in a drawing-room, or the mistress of a friend. What
can be her way of loving? Of what does its voluptuous secret consist?
And for some time this woman has haunted my mind, not, indeed, to the
exclusion of all other thoughts, but at intervals and persistently.
Such phantasies suddenly present themselves to my imagination even when
I hold Hippolyte in my arms. Why should she not have been seized by
desire upon sight of some passing man? Had I the gift of reading her
soul and saw it traversed by such a desire, if but for a moment, I
should, without the slightest doubt, consider my mistress sullied by an
indelible stain and it seems to me that I should die of grief. This
material proof I can never have, because the soul of my mistress is
invisible and impalpable; this, however, does not prevent the soul from
being as much or even more exposed to profanation than the body may be.
But the analogy enlightens me; the possibility is certain. Perhaps at
this very moment my mistress is cognisant of a recent stain upon her
conscience and sees this stain expand beneath her contemplation."
Stunned by his pain, he started violently.
"What ails you--of what are you thinking?" asked Hippolyte gently.
"Of you," he replied.
"Good or bad?"
"Bad."